Gap Year Opportunities

You want to go travelling, you want to open your horizons, but you want something more than just a year back-packing on well trodden routes.

You want to go places and experience cultures you couldn't see on your own, you want to work, gain some experience, test yourself, discover skills you didn't realise you had and learn some new ones, give yourself an edge over your peers, do something extraordinary with this special year that will stay with you forever, discover your potential so you can move on with your life with confidence.

But you are a bit unsure about how to do get all this. You are at the right place. Come and learn from an expert.

Every year i have a couple of positions for young people helping me with my trips. It works like this...

You pay me €1950. This covers your time with em and all your transport while you are on my trips. You just pay your own food and accommodation throughout. You will need to budget at €30 per day. You then come with me, either on my Sahara Overland trip in September or December or you fly out to wherever I am. You stay with me for as long as you like and I will show you the ropes and teach you how to travel - there is a knack to learn.

I will show you how to deal with people - clients, officials, locals. You will assist me with my trips, looking after clients making sure they have what they need, carrying bags, loading the vehicles, strapping down the roof rack. You'll help me dig us out of sand when we get stuck, help change a tyre that has punctured. I may send you on ahead to organise our arrival someplace, set up camp, liase with my guides my drivers and my operators.

You'll see amazing places, meet wonderful people, and take part in extraordinary adventures. Then perhaps you'll decide to do your own thing, like teach in a school or live with a family in the desert. Or you'll go off somewhere on your own.

I'll be there to support you, set you up and on your way - I'll be there on the end of the phone or an email away, to help you out and advise you on where to go, show you what to do and how to do it. You'll discover your patience, respect and humility - all important aspects of travelling.

We'll talk African politics, history, language and art. You'll learn French and bits of many other languages. But most of all and best of all you'll learn about yourself.

You will return home more independent, more aware, more patient, more open minded and more responsible, having had the time of your life, a time you will never forget, a time that you will use in everything you do for the rest of your time on earth.

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When I was 18 I took a year out between school and university. I was lucky, I had family in Zimbabwe. I went and stayed with them, I worked on a farm and shadowed a journalist, but I wanted more...

I found a truck driver who was driving from Harare to Nairobi, through Zambia and Tanzania. "I'm leaving, 8 am tomorrow, be here". My family freaked: "The rest of Africa is not like Zimbabwe, you'll die". In those days Zimbabwe was a respectable state but here's the first lesson - people who haven't done the journey you want to do do not know what they are talking about. All they can go on is their received information, and that is distorted by so much cultural propaganda.

Family are the worst, because they do not know or understand, and so they fear.

Leaving behind the cries of my family, i set off with John and Oliver. We drove all day and all night, switching turns on the bed. In the morning we showered under waterfalls. After breakfast we'd prepare diner: steak wrapped in tin foil placed on the gearbox, 12 hours later it was beautifully cooked.

After Zambia into Tanzania. Outside Dar Es Salaam I jumped ship, John gave me enough local money to catch a bus into town. It was a sunday so no banks were open - in those days there were no cash points, mobile phones or internet. For the first time in my life no one knew where I was, I was totally alone.

I begged a room that would not lock, I slept with my knife in my hand convinced that this was where my family's prediction would come true. The next morning I met Carlo, a 35 year old Italian station master. He took me under his wing and for three weeks we travelled across Tanzania, to Zanzibar, the great Rift Valley, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Manyara.

Eventually I was done, and I caught John and Oliver returning to Zimbabwe. I arrived back to my family for Christmas.

Stinking to high heaven, exhausted by my adventure, but the happiest man alive.

That night in Dar Es Salaam was the last time I was scared in Africa. That trip, and the impetus it gave me to carry on travelling - Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and India followed in that year and many places since - set me up for life.

I went to university, more confident in myself, more aware of other worlds, other ways, other lives. Independent of mind, free in spirit, bold in outlook and recognising a very important truth: wWe have one life, we are here now, we better make the most of it.

Little did I know back then that one day this experience would end up providing the foundation for my business!

But more than that it set me up to know I could do whatever I wanted in life.